


Just One Look (And I Forget Everything)

by lightatlast



Series: the gattaca ABO thing [1]
Category: The Martian (2015), The Martian - All Media Types, The Martian - Andy Weir
Genre: Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Mentions of assorted other characters, Multi, What Have I Done, the gattaca ABO thing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-26
Updated: 2015-10-26
Packaged: 2018-04-28 04:42:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,757
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5078218
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lightatlast/pseuds/lightatlast
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mark just wanted to go to space. So what if he had to pretend to be a beta for basically his whole post-pubescent life. He's got it under control. </p><p>Then Dr. Christopher Beck happens. </p><p>So does Beth Johanssen.</p><p>And then so does Mars.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Just One Look (And I Forget Everything)

So, here’s the deal. Heats come about six months apart, and Mark’s, when he’s letting ‘em happen, are pretty regular. Any closer together and Mark probably never would have made it to Mars. But even still, in the four years before Ares IV, that still makes eight heats. Mark only brought enough suppressants to last him until they were supposed to make it home, and even then, he left them on the Hermes. But the real problem is that heats are basically debilitating – and they burn a lot of calories. Considering Mark’s already short on those, he’s got a problem; well, another one, besides that whole trapped on Mars thing.

……

Mark’s already been pretending for years and years by the time he gets selected for the Ares III mission. He wouldn’t be here if he hadn’t, given the whole _no omegas in space thing_. He’s always wanted to be an astronaut, so he worked around it.

College applications always have a “decline to state” option for orientation, just like they do for race, and high schools aren’t allowed to put it in your permanent records, an anti-discrimination measure that Mark took full advantage of. Mostly it’s betas who use it, though, because being on record as an alpha means you get a pass if you lose your mind and beat the crap of that guy who’s on a date with _your_ omega – and most omegas don’t even go to college. But Mark went because he loved science, and no one really knew he was an omega, other than Mom and Dad.

It’s surprisingly easy to hide it, actually. Mark used suppressants to cheat his natural cycle until his heats fell during summer and Christmas breaks every year, which meant he didn’t have to take conspicuous time off school every six months, or skip them entirely, which can be unhealthy in the long term. Outside of those times, he doesn’t give off all that many pheromones, which means he can disguise it pretty well with the pheromone-burying spray that omega social workers use around alpha teenagers to avoid attachment issues, and he disguises that with cologne.

He already had some pretty non-omega interests, in all honesty, so when he decides to major in mechanical engineering, that pretty much convinces everyone, even if he also does a degree in botany. Mostly, he takes shameless advantage of everyone’s assumptions, and it works really well for him. The hardest part was getting his instincts under control around alphas, and by this point in his life, he’s got a pretty good handle on it.

Until he meets Dr. Christopher Beck, flight surgeon for the Ares III mission. _Goddammit._

……

Mark’s never actually spent one of his heats with an alpha, so the lack of one is not the issue at hand. He couldn’t risk someone saying something to the wrong person, or even worse, ending up pregnant. It’s not that Mark doesn’t want kids, he just wanted the final frontier more. And now he’s probably too old for babies anyway. If he lives long enough for that to worry about that.

But Mars is trying to kill him, every second of every day, he has a limited food supply and a ton of work to do to attempt to not die. And heats last from two to four days, during which he’ll burn almost twice as many calories as normal. That’s two to four days he won’t be able to do any of that work, and need more of that limited food supply, every six months. And that’s an issue.

…..

Mark was the last one chosen for the mission. He didn’t know if he’d get on this time, and after that, well, he’s getting old for an astronaut. By the time the next mission rolled around, he’d probably be too old for them to want to send him, so this was his last chance – and he was so happy when he was chosen.

He knew that they’d chosen Melissa Lewis as mission commander, even though she’s a beta, like Mark pretends to be. That’s really impressive, and Mark kind of felt bad for the fact that his “surprise, omega’s can go to space and do science” reveal was probably going to overshadow that achievement. He knows they chose Beck next, because the fact is that most surgeons are alphas, so they had to choose one who would be willing to take orders from a beta – and that already told Mark that Beck was going to be a pretty good guy, since he was the one they chose.

Johanssen was next, then Martinez, then Vogel, and finally Mark. So the others had been training together for a while before Mark joined them. Apparently long enough for Beck to develop a crush on Johanssen that could be seen from space – or, you know, from earth, when they were in space. _They were going to space!_

But that was only the second thing he noticed about Beck because the first was that Mark wanted to roll over, splay his legs and bare his neck to him, the second he laid eyes on him. And like he said, he’d gotten pretty good at suppressing that crap, so the force of it tells him Beck is _his_ alpha, something Mark had started to think he’d never find. And he can’t tell him. If he ducks out at this stage because he found his alpha, he’ll probably be in a ton of trouble for wasting NASA’s time and money training him and it’ll set omega rights back like twenty years – plus Mark still really wants to go to Mars.

So he had to figure out how to deal with this. Deal the fact that he just wants Beck to lay on top of him with his full weight and bite him all over, deal with the way he wants to trail after him like a lost puppy, deal with the way his heart clenches like it’s suddenly dealing with Jupiter’s gravity instead of Earth’s every time he walks in on Beck and Johanssen flirting adorably.

……

Mark’s about to add another first to his list – first omega to go through heat on an alien planet. It’s super exciting!

And he can’t stop thinking about Beck, about how the crew is almost four months away now, and that means they would be four months closer to Mark no longer hiding. He’d planned to offer himself to Beck – to Chris – basically the second they cleared quarantine after landing, even though Chris is clearly in love with Beth. An alpha wants an omega, right? Even if it’s just to have an omega. He could deal with being a matter of convenience, an add-on to Chris and Beth’s relationship, as long as he got Chris some of the time.

He’s not sure he’d even get that much though. Chris has never shown any inclination toward being more than friends with Mark. Except that once, but it never happened again, so Mark doesn’t really count it.

…….

Beck is _amazing_. And, it turns out, so is Beth. They’re probably Mark’s best friends at this point, and while he suspects that they’re doing some more-than-friendly activities when he’s not around, he tries not to think about it.

It works pretty well, most of the time. So what if he still occasionally wants to drop to his knees next to Beck and rest his forehead on his thigh, if he sometimes wants to braid Beth’s hair, a social grooming thing that he’s honestly never had the urge to practice before. He thinks they’d make a good triad, one of each orientation, if Beck and Beth had any interest.

Mark doesn’t think they do, though, not really. Beck clearly doesn’t feel the same pull toward Mark that Mark feels to him – he certainly doesn’t gaze longingly after him like Mark sometimes catching himself doing to Beck.

On his optimistic days, Mark hopes that’s just because he’s smothering his pheromones for all he’s worth. On bad days, he remembers that he’s older than either Beth or Beck, that he’s basically a mechanic who sometimes grows plants to their computer genius and rockstar surgeon, respectively. But those are really more like bad nights – mostly he only thinks about it at three in the morning when he can’t sleep.

Besides, he’s having too much fun gelling with his team and doing astronaut training to get all angsty. He almost cackled when he overheard someone talking about the fact that he was chosen because he scored unusually high on agreeability for a beta; they picked him to be the team peacemaker because he responds to emotionally stressful situations with soothing actions and jokes – basically for his omega personality traits, when being an omega would get him thrown off the mission. But he works it for all he’s worth.

He can get Lewis to loosen up occasionally, snarks constantly with Martinez, teases Beth in as older-brotherly a fashion as he can manage – wouldn’t want it to look like flirting. Lewis’s “don’t hit on Johanssen” speech had been terrifying, despite the fact that Mark would never try to pick up a beta, even one as cute and brilliant as Beth.

The team is _good_ – and Mark’s not going to ruin it by messing up the dynamics, even if Beck did drunkenly hit on him that one time.

……

Mark hasn’t had a heat in years, and he forgot how much they could suck. At least the potatoes didn’t die while he was…busy. On to the next problem.

……

They finally got to leave for Mars. They put him in charge of the social media, which was again, hilarious. The only really high-ranking omega employed by NASA is Annie Montrose, the head of the PR department, so choosing him to do this without knowing his true orientation was just perfect.

But they were off. And if Mark had though that they were all in each other’s business on Earth, well, it’s nothing to the Hermes. Sometimes Mark had to go hide out with his plants to get space from how much he wants to let Beck bend him over the nearest flat surface. Everyone else thinks his plants are boring, so it’s the perfect hideaway.

The fact that he sometimes has to hide from how much he also wants Beth to bend him over the nearest flat surface as well is really just a minor inconvenience, by this point.

Mark doesn’t really know how to feel about how he’s spent so many years yearning to get up here, in space, on his way to Mars, and now he kind of can’t wait for it to be over. He’s never felt like the omega and the scientist inside him were so much in conflict before, never even really felt like there was a distinction. But, boy, does he feel it now.

…….

Mark still has years on Mars at this point, assuming he makes it that long, and he’s pretty sure that he’s going to lose his mind. See, he started thinking about the fact that Chris thinks he’s dead – that Chris was probably the one who declared him dead, and it probably didn’t affect him anymore than it would have if it were Martinez. He knows Chris will mourn, of course, but not like he would if Beth had been lost in the storm, and that kind of kills him.

He’s glad Chris has Beth though. He wouldn’t want him to be alone.

……

The first five sols on Mars are amazing. Then Sol 6 happens.

…….

Mark finally gets Pathfinder and achieves communication. It turns out Mom and Dad revealed the whole omega thing while everyone thought he was dead, and Mark has his own hashtag now that people know he’s alive. That’s kind of weird. For all he became an astronaut, Mark never thought he’d be famous. He was the seventeenth person on Mars. Not exactly ground breaking stuff.

But then it turns out those assholes at NASA didn’t tell his crew, and that shit is not on. Even if Chris doesn’t love Mark the way Mark loves him, even if Beth has never shown any inclination his way, the crew is a family. You don’t keep the alive-ness of a member from family.

But now there’s a plan. Mark might actually make it home.

……

The plan fails. Potatoes are the work of the devil.

…….

There’s a new plan. Mark’s team is coming back for him. They’re idiots to risk it, but he’s so glad.

After all, he needs to personally introduce Lewis to some music that was made after 1980.

…….

The trip to the Schiaparelli crater is grueling. Entering orbit in a convertible spaceship is terrible. Being caught and brought home by Chris is possibly the greatest thing that’s ever happened to Mark in his life. He’s even ranking it above the ability to never eat another potato until the day he dies.

And then Chris takes off his helmet, and he’s helping Mark take his off, and he gets to watch the way Chris’s pupils dilate all the way out with the first inhale of Mark’s scent. Mark knows he smells terrible, but it’s Chris’s first time really getting Mark’s scent, without the pheromone blockers, and he’s clearly not completely immune.

Of course, Chris also hasn’t been around an omega, any omega, in almost four years, and for all he’s in love with Beth, he is still an alpha, so it could just be that.

…….

It’s not just that. After the crew has a chance to shower him with affection and jokes about how terrible he smells, Chris shuffles him into his exam room, then the shower, and then into Chris’s own bed. Apparently Mark’s room is unusable for reasons no one wants to take the time to explain right now.

According to Chris, Mark’s in about as good of shape as one could expect after two years on reduced rations alone on an alien planet and a mostly unprotected space flight, which is to say, terrible, but not in imminent danger of dying. So that’s pretty great.

And then Beth shows up and she tuck herself right into the bed alongside Mark like she belongs there, not saying a word, and Chris is pacing the two-and-a-half steps his bunk allows for, over and over, not saying anything either. Just when Mark is about to crack a truly terrible joke – probably about potatoes or disco, he’s gotten predictable on Mars – Chris erupts.

“Why didn’t you _tell_ me? I mean, I know why you couldn’t tell NASA, but I’m not NASA, Mark. I always – but Beth, I met her before – and the pull was there, but I couldn’t figure out _why_. Do you know what that was like? And Beth and I – we talked about – but too many betas, without an omega is – but you were there all along, exactly what we needed, and what we wanted too and we didn’t know it.”

“Chris –“

“You’re _mine_ , and I didn’t know, and then you died, and then it turned out you didn’t, but you were probably going to, and you had never said anything, I had to find out from the data burst – didn’t you ever feel it? Haven’t you ever wanted me? Wanted us?”

“Every day. Every day since the day I joined the crew that first time and I had to fight like I haven’t in years, not to hit my knees and bare my throat and beg you to keep me. And Beth, well, you snuck up on me, but I want you, too. I was going to tell you the second NASA let us go after we got home, but I’ve been hiding for over a decade for this mission and I couldn’t just let it go, no matter how much I wanted you.”

And that was enough to stop the pacing. Chris took one step over to the bedside, and in a strange reversal of what Mark had wanted for years, dropped to his knees. Mark tilted his head back, and Chris reached out and wrapped his hand gently, so gently around his throat. And then he leaned in and kissed Mark, finally, after years of waiting. When he pulled back, he dropped his head into the curve of Mark’s shoulder. Beth leaned to kiss each of them, Chris on the back of the head and Mark on the lips, and then snuggled down on Mark’s other side.

And they just stayed there.

There was nowhere Mark would rather be, not even Earth.

**Author's Note:**

> Come find me at lightfromthelostland.tumblr.com I'm new and shiny and need people to have too many feelings with.


End file.
